NB: This is an archival review, first written many years ago, during a period when I was part of the Amazon Vine programme. Although I didn’t get this book under that scheme. Sadly Amazon booted me off Vine, and deleted all my thousands of reviews! Some of them I had back-ups of. I’m putting those up here.
A marvellous gem of a collection
I love this book! It’s beautiful. For an ardent Tolkien-ophile like me it’s pure pleasure to read the erudite and informative text, or pore over Tolkien’s fabulous pictures. Tolkien’s best artworks are truly wonderful, and his maps and cover designs are all of a piece with his ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, the total work of art and imagination that is his special act of genius.
Definitely something for the buff, this book assumes knowledge of Tolkien and his world, including, very naturally, The Hobbit itself. It’s wonderful to learn more about the evolution of the book, for example the ‘Home Manuscript’, from which he read the story to his children, and in which illustrations played their part right from the beginning, and see how his maps, sketches, illustrations and design work, all fed into an ever-evolving creative process.
Learning about some of the specific triggers for Tolkien’s ideas, for example his ‘adventure’ in the Swiss Alps in 1911 that inspired the part of the story (and the corresponding illustration, ‘The Mountain Path’) in which Bilbo and his companions are in the mountains during a dramatic thunderstorm, or the historical buildings that inspired Beorn’s hall, or the lake-town of Esgaroth, is both fascinating and deeply pleasurable.
The print quality is superb, with details that were not visible in the various book-form publications of The Hobbit now clearly there to be seen and enjoyed, and augmented by much more in the way of sketches and related artworks. As just one example of how this ancillary material enriches the Tolkien/Hobbit experience, consider that Tolkien wrote a beautifully executed calligraphic version of Thorin’s note to Bilbo, in Tengwar script. This is so typical of the joyfully creative obsessional perfectionist streak exemplified in the whole of Tolkien’s creative work.
Bearing in mind this perfectionist tendency, it’s both endearing and plain wonderful that Tolkien, an amateur artist, was both able to provide this rich visual material to further enhance the experience of his imaginary world, and received the support of his publishers in doing so. Acutely aware of his own shortcomings (especially noticeable where he depicts figures), he didn’t let this stop him. His highly stylised images range from beautiful black and white pictures, such as the aforementioned ‘Mountain Path’, or the fantastic depiction of curling smoke contrasting with vertical tree trunks in ‘The Trolls’, to richly coloured pieces like the homely ‘Hobbiton-across-the-Water’, or the decoratively abstract adventurousness of ‘Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves’, this last apparently being Tolkien’s own favourite.
The richness of Tolkien’s conception extends to such things as beautifully stylised ornamental borders (often quite art-nouveau/deco in feel), the presence of his linguistic ideas in beautiful runes, or elvish scripts (both within and as borders to images), the use of maps both as aids to his own writing and illustration work, gorgeous evocative images in themselves, as well as for the reader’s use, and the design work he did for the book-binding and dust jacket, the latter being a superbly stylised three colour affair, which has lately and very understandably come back into vogue in the flurry of Hobbit anniversary editions.
If, like me, you own other books of Tolkien’s art, there is going to be some overlap and repetition (Tolkien’s complete artistic output is after all fairly small, and, barring new archival discoveries, not going to grow!). But having all the material relating to The Hobbit in one extremely handsome volume – and both the hardback itself, and the slipcase, are wonderful – is just fabulous. Like the shining Arkenstone atop the dragon hoard under the Lonely Mountain, so beautifully depicted in ‘Conversation with Smaug’ this book is a marvellous gem.